I had a Gmail account 'x@gmail.com' with ~2000 messages, and I wanted to move all of these to a new account 'y@gmail.com' so that I could empty x@gmail.com.

I set them both up in Outlook 2010 and made sure they were both synced with Outlook's data files properly. Then (within the Outlook environment), I dragged the all mail folder from x@gmail.com to y@gmail.com. A progress bar/dialogue came up and it proceeded to copy things. After about an hour and 75% through the progress bar it stopped with an error message (which I can't remember).

Now when I look in x@gmail.com via browser interface it's completely empty, and y@gmail.com only has 30 of the emails. If I access y@gmail.com via Outlook, I can view all ~2000 emails, so they're obviously in the data file on my PC. But it won't sync them with the actual Gmail account. The progress bar at the bottom finishes and there are still only 30 emails in y@gmail.com. How do I get them all in there?

Also, when I look at the Outlook data file directory via Windows, there are two data files for x@gmail.com: 'x@gmail.com' and 'x@gmail.com(2)'. The former is 260Kb and the latter is 300Mb. Why are there two?

If you are using IMAP FYI gmail.com starts to rate limit your IMAP connections after a bit of data is transferred (they won't say how much) as I was doing basically the same thing but from Hotmail to gmail using Outlook.

I wish I'd taken a snip of the error message. Would timing out result in a little error message message, or would it automatically resume after a while. I noticed that before the error that Outlook went 'unresponsive' a couple of times, but It fixed itself after ~30 seconds.

Chainsaw: Can't the y gmail account just read the x account and leave out Outlook altogether? I have a mate that reads another Gmail account with his Gmail account.

They can do that, but that wasn't really my intention. And now the issue is that my 2000 messages are stuck in Outlook (locally stored on my hard drive) and I can't get it to sync them back onto a Gmail account.

Finally got them across. Took two more tries though. Not sure what the problem was to be honest.

I have one more question - maybe a stupid one as I'm a total outlook noob, but why is there an 'Outlook Data File' tree in the side bar along with my 'blah@gmail.com' accounts? See it's the top one, and it has it's own Inbox, Drafts, Deleted etc.:

The gmail.com accounts I've added have their data files stored by outlook, so what is the point of this extra one?

The Outlook one will just be the default folders that are created when you run Outlook for the very first time. If they aren't being used you can just right-click on it and select 'Close Outlook Data File' from the pop up menu.

CYaBro: The Outlook one will just be the default folders that are created when you run Outlook for the very first time. If they aren't being used you can just right-click on it and select 'Close Outlook Data File' from the pop up menu.

If I put stuff in them will it be safe stored in there (like an offline archive)?

CYaBro: The Outlook one will just be the default folders that are created when you run Outlook for the very first time. If they aren't being used you can just right-click on it and select 'Close Outlook Data File' from the pop up menu.

If I put stuff in them will it be safe stored in there (like an offline archive)?

You could do that yes but it won't really be safe unless you backup the PST file to another hard drive as well.

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